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It is well known that the mind affects the body. We know, for instance, that neuropeptides link thoughts and emotions with biology via the psychosomatic network. But at what level do thoughts start to affect the body? I mean, at some basic level, mind must affect matter.
In studying what in known as neuroplasticity of the brain, where the growth of brain cells can respond to free will and intention, scientists have proposed that the mind exists outside of the brain and interacts with the brain at the quantum level. This is the root of mind-body science....! A solid theory of the ‘Quantum Mind’ has been put forward by Henry Stapp, a theoretical physicist from Berkley, Jeffrey Schwartz, a neuropsychiatrist at UCLA, and Mario Beauregard, a psychologist at the University of Montreal.
Mainstream science has always believed that the mind is a product of chemical interactions in the brain, but more and more research is pointing towards what mystics have always taught....That the brain is only a receiver for the signals from the mind. It acts like a radio that receives broadcast signals from a station. It would be incorrect to say that the radio itself is the source of the music that is played on it, yet that is what science has always believed with regards to the brain – that it is the source of thoughts.
So the brain, according to new theories, receives the signals from the mind. In quantum physics, a single particle appears out of a sea of probabilities. A bit like life really; something happens out of a range of possible things that could have happened. With the mind and brain, then, out of a range of possible thoughts, the mind chooses one thought, which then causes quantum particles to condense, and the result is that the brain receives a real signal. The signal came from outside the brain..! From the mind..!
Further evidence for the mind-outside-of-the-brain theory comes from research into Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Researchers have shown that NDE patients have been fully conscious yet their brain recorded zero activity. I once tried to induce an out of body experience. I must have dropped off to sleep but when I awoke I tried to get up but felt like I had a piece of elastic holding my back to the bed. Imagine my surprise when I turned around and saw my body lying there asleep?
Taking it further – what I often contemplate in meditation - the mind is formless. It has no form in and of itself. That would be like saying the field of mathematics has a particular shape and size. Mathematics is everywhere, wherever you look for it. You can find mathematics in a table leg, in a grain of sand, on a leaf of a tree, everywhere you look. In the same way, then, so is the mind everywhere. We experience ourselves as a physical body because we identify with it and it alone. But in reality, we are....Well, we just ARE..
Jung believed that all of our minds (at the unconscious level) are interconnected – the Collective Unconscious.
And so many of the ‘signals’ received by the brain may actually come from the collective unconscious, as I pointed out in It’s the Thought that Counts. This may be the source of great creative leaps and also why many people often make the same creative leap at the same time. Just a thought....!
This article is Copyright © 2008 by David R. Hamilton Ph.D.
Please feel free to share it with friends, but please credit the author (Dr David R. Hamilton) and the source,
http://www.drdavidhamilton.com
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